She told him this was called pattern-print cloth, a handicraft from the village she’d grown up in. Every woman in this place used to know how to weave this fabric, and on rainy days if you walked down the paved road between the rural dwellings, you’d hear shuttles clacking as the looms worked away. She didn’t realize she was already starting to disclose her origins, her history, to this man. In the picture she presented him, the Jiangnan village she’d once despised became beautiful. She showed it to him in its entirety, the black tiles and whitewashed walls, the covered boats, the endless yellow fields of rapeseed blossom. Then zooming in to a medium shot: a stone bridge with children walking across it, young cowherds on their way to work. Among them was a girl of six or seven—that was her. She’d been born in the year of the Cultural Revolution, and her illiterate parents had given her a name that was trendy at the time: 红梅, Hongmei, red plum blossom. She’d wanted to change this country-bumpkin-sounding name on a few occasions but couldn’t bring herself to do it. After all, her parents had raised her only once, named her only once.

He replied that he could see this remote riverside village. It sounds like you love it a lot, don’t you? That’s the only way you would describe it in those terms.

She was startled. She’d never thought she loved it; in fact she’d wanted above all to get away from it. When meeting new people, she lied about it, trying to keep it hidden. She’d once thought anywhere was better than her village, that back-of-beyond place, as out of touch as a frog at the bottom of a well. As a young child, she’d encountered a group of people known as “educated youths,” city kids sent to the countryside under the Red Guards’ watchful eyes, who had confirmed her instincts—they had done nothing but criticize the place. Just like her, they had thought nowhere on this Earth could be so hideous. How could she love it?